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Jean Florence

Casting Off

On his twenty first birthday I helped him move out,drove him to London after work. We didn’t talk much.Arrived at midnight glad to find a parking place outside,laboured, unloading, up and down three flights of stairs.

He slept on the couch downstairs, gave me his roomand a futon mattress I folded over to makea minimal bed on the brown linoleum in thecorner of the white box. No curtains yet.

In the morning he brought me teaand squatted companionably, chatting of technologyand plans for building furniture, before setting offfor work. Make yourself at home, he said. The others are all out.

Left among the jetsam of working boots, vinyl,decks, computers, decorated with t-shirts, socksand woolly hats, I contemplate the bare white wallswaiting for another life to write them.

Outside the window, the backs of tall brick houses,metal fire escapes, small walled gardens, bare trees:the once familiar common hinterland of London streets.Behind the garden walls: a school and playground.

Go down to make more tea in the shared kitchen:remembered clutter, the sink piled with perennial washing up,a litter of food and nothing to eat: mixed herbs, marmite, tomato ketchup,boil in the bag rice, cereal, no milk in the fridge.

From outside the ageless babble of playtime breaks inas sudden as a whistling kettle, the same,no doubt, from Peckham to Peking, a boisterousburst of energy, bracketed by bells and stillness.

Back on the mattress wrapped in his duvetsuspended weightless in unordered time,I am not an ageing woman grown stout and mossyand sprouting hairs on my chin. I am twenty four again

waking in just such a room on a London morningafter hitching down the Al, with ten poundsand some phone numbers in my pocket. Is itfear for him I feel, or envy, coming

home tonight to this space containing all hefeels essential to support a life.Nowhere in me any more is energy toface the weather in the streets. Instead I finish